Nowadays, as information systems become ubiquitous, and companies and organizations of all sectors become severely dependent on their computing network and IT services, the demand for tools for monitoring IT environments increases rapidly. The class of sensitive IT services includes online transaction processing, electronic commerce, Internet/World Wide Web, data warehousing, telecommunication switches, and server applications that generally run 24 hours a day. In addition, almost all internal business processes such as electronic communication or information retrieval rely on a properly functioning IT network. These servers must run perpetually, providing a service to the employees and clients, and therefore demand a high availability as the cost of any outage can be substantial. While it is essential for companies to maintain the health of their IT services, the underlying IT environment becomes more and more complex and thus susceptible to failures. Not only is the number of computers within an IT network growing rapidly, but also many services are distributed over the network and depend thus on several network components. In large IT networks those dependencies make it impossible for administrators and operators to keep an overview over the performance of the IT services without an appropriate service management tool.
Operators of complex services that are distributed over different platforms within an IT network are often confronted with a huge number of messages reporting the status and errors of nodes of the IT network. Due to the number of network components and the complex interactions between those components it is difficult for the operator to resolve the dependencies of the generated error messages and to track down the origin of the problem. Moreover, it is even difficult to detect important error messages and distinguish them from less important messages so that there is a risk that the operator overlooks relevant messages in the stream of messages.
A service management tool is an IT solution for managing the availability and performance of IT-based business services from the end user's perspective. Those tools are able to detect and evaluate the health and availability of a service or application, recognize and warn the operator when a problem is about to occur and respond automatically to poor performance. They allow the user to manage individual services and all elements that depend on these services. They enable the user to build management models of the IT environment that represent the service elements and the relationships and dependencies between them. One feature of those service management tools is therefore to provide the status of any of those services in the light of the dependencies amongst them. The Hewlett-Packard product HP OpenView VantagePoint for Windows™ is such a service management system that runs under Windows™ but is also able to manage heterogeneous IT environments independent of the platform.
Service management tools are aiming to support administrators and operators of complex network-based IT services. In general, the task of administrators is to set up the management model, to configure it and maintain the model configuration, and to define failures and suppression criteria in order to reduce the information that is sent to operators. The operators' primary function is to monitor the status of a service and to troubleshoot and respond to problems using the information provided by the service management tool.
Service management tools are usually built on common network software and common console software such as the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) for the Windows™ environment which is a common console framework for IT management applications. MMC provides a basic framework for the management of IT environments. The invention, however, is intended to improve the possibilities of monitoring IT environments in view of the growing complexity of those environments.